


strangling the insipid flowers

by fab_ia



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/F, Gore, Violence, character study in the worst ways possible, in which rachel has some feelings about a monster and decides she herself is one, overuse of butchered mythology references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23280706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fab_ia/pseuds/fab_ia
Summary: "your name is persephone and she is hades, ripping you away from your everyday life and plunging you instead into a world of darkness and pain, rust and decay."
Relationships: Miranda Pryce/Rachel Young
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	strangling the insipid flowers

here is a story.

your name is persephone and she is hades, ripping you away from your comfortable and settled everyday life and plunging you instead into a world of darkness and pain where all you have known before and all you will ever know again is rust and decay. she is hades with the taste of forbidden fruit on her lips, tart and sharp as it coats your own. her garden of rot coils around your ankles and anchors you to the dirt beneath your feet as she pulls you in once more.

in one ending, you get a reprieve, brief moments in the light. the real persephone got six months apiece but you get nights, usually, and evenings rarely. in a fairytale ending, in one cut down from the abomination that is the truth, these brief moments of freedom would lift all the weight from your shoulders, they would set you free and let you take off the mask of cold calculation that cages your face and closes off escape.

that ending is not yours. that is not what happens in your story.

the darkness and the decay consume you, dig into your veins and replace red with muddied, filthy water, with black that courses through arteries and stains your insides. it sets you free, you serpent, you coiling serpentine beast, shedding your skin in the sense that it rips off who you were and exposes the new you to the world, still raw and bloodied but eyes wild and mind sharper than it ever has been before. the real persephone who you could have been, once, didn’t know that to survive hell you need to revel in it, you need to relish carnage, and you were always taught to make the best of every situation. she was soft where you make yourself hard, warm where you become cold, gentle and kind and everything you decidedly are  _ not _ .

hell is bureaucracy - paperwork and ink stains and stale coffee that stains ever mug and fake leather office chairs that crack and split and are never  _ quite  _ comfortable. it is cold basement floors, the white-tiled laboratory that you watch the masters stain in shades of red as you watch on from the window. the sound of a keyboard too fast to follow.

every touch of her skin against yours - and it isn’t right to call her hades, really, when you have names for her that roll so much easier from the tongue and don’t leave you in the role of the doting, weak-willed follower; when her other names carry every bit as much weight as a pseudonym would. hellfire attacks your skin with every accidental brush of fingers, every moment of the furtive glances at her silhouette across the room that leave you grinning into your glass of cabernet and ignoring the metallic aftertaste as it slides down your throat.

miranda doesn’t treat you gently. she knows your mask of a demure maiden was never anything less than utter bullshit and tells you as much as she claws at your back and tears away wax and copper and leaves you stranded with her and no possibility of escape. not that you would want to anyway. miranda seems to be one of the few people who can truly see the beast that snarls in your ribcage, the one who encourages it to claw its way out and leave the inside of your chest raw and weeping with every touch of her hand. she tilts your head up with the lightest touch of a finger, bares your throat with the slightest nod imaginable, tears you limb from limb every time she pulls you against her and presses your lips together.

and, oh, rachel, your gut wrenches and there’s the familiar burn of nausea when you study your reflection in the mirror, divided by cracks that spiderweb from the corner with the shards stained like they’ve rusted at the corners. you stare at yourself long after she’s let the door of your apartment shut behind her, long after the fire in your chest has died to simply embers, when the only evidence she ever existed in your personal life outside of late-night inadmissible fantasies are the hairs on the pillow beside your own; the marks that slowly darken around your throat, twisting and turning and spiralling and scarring the flesh with the undeniable evidence of her presence. and if, say, you were to imagine white down covering your shoulders, if you were to crane your neck and arch your spine in  _ just  _ the right way, you would see where her nails have dug in, where the wings of freedom could never sit atop the slope of your back.

there’s blood on the bedsheets, you see, when you finally look back after a shower that’s left you shivering in the apartment, water running pink as it ran down the drain. that’s probably why she was smiling.

and gods help you, whoever you decide to pray to that day, because you love her despite the monstrosity so obvious and apparent in everything she does, because the horror that she is is one that so beautifully compliments the aggression you keep under wraps in your own life, too. you love her even when you don’t turn away from the viscera, although the red fog clouding the image of her in your mind begs to differ.

your relationship is one that can’t be defined by a single word - even that one, you begrudge to use, because society yearns for a certain definition of it and what the two of you have is so far from that it feels almost blasphemous to apply it. there are others that could be considered - partnership, acquaintances - but there are subtleties to each of them that don’t fit, society’s definition of them too restricting and tightly-wound to be right. so you use none. so, you call her pryce, you call her doctor, you call her  _ miranda _ \- names upon names upon names, all chosen for herself by herself. if she were to push you towards another, you would be more than willing to add it to your personal dictionary of doctor miranda pryce.

  
  


you think, often. you consider her.

she is far from feminine by any typical definition of the word - a developer, face unmarred by any powders or creams that society presses towards people like you from every direction. all that has ever touched her skin is what comes from yours, flaking off and leaving crumbled colour beneath every touch. she would prefer a bouquet of binary to any flowers you could find to offer her, even if you were to tear them from the earth yourself, even if you had made the very planet quake as you uprooted them.

she despises nature. natural is her antithesis, looking most at home beneath fluorescent bulbs with the light reflecting on her eyes and giving her the almost-robotic look she has striven to achieve. the gravity remains even when it shouldn’t, and the two of you stand shoulder to shoulder as you gaze out at the burning star, her hand ice cold against the small of your back.

if you were to lean closer, you think she might smell of pomegranate.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr @sciencematter and twitter @kiaaanne_n
> 
> title is from 'hades and persephone' by carol tufts, found here https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39086


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